To offset gains that Donald J. Trump made in rural and suburban America in 2024, Kamala Harris needed to do better than Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s strong 2020 electoral performance in cities. But she ended up doing worse in urban America — getting 15 percent fewer votes than Mr. Biden in some cities. A New York Times analysis of precinct-level election results — the most detailed available publicly — across 11 cities shows how it happened.

In Atlanta and its suburbs, both candidates found new voters, but Ms. Harris’s gains in precincts where white voters were the largest racial or ethnic group were canceled out by losses elsewhere. Mr. Trump’s uptick in support from voters of color across Atlanta, along with improved performance in the state’s rural areas, was enough for him to win Georgia — a swing state he narrowly lost to Mr. Biden in 2020.

Chicago is emblematic of the chief problem the Harris campaign faced in urban areas — a big decline in votes in Democratic strongholds. Even though Ms. Harris won the city by a 58-point margin, she lost ground in nearly every precinct. She picked up just 127,000 votes in Mexican and Puerto Rican neighborhoods, 47,000 fewer than Mr. Biden earned in 2020. Mr. Trump made small gains across the board, but Ms. Harris’s losses were much steeper.

In Wayne County, which includes Detroit, Ms. Harris struggled to capture the support of Arab-American voters, many of whom had been turned off by the Biden administration’s Middle East policies. In a swath of voting precincts spanning Dearborn and Hamtramck, which have the nation’s highest concentration of people of Arab ancestry, Mr. Trump picked up thousands of votes compared with 2020, while the Democratic Party lost an even bigger number. Countywide, precincts with high shares of Arab residents made up just 6 percent of the electorate but accounted for more than 40 percent of the decline in Democratic votes.

The story in Houston was more about Ms. Harris underperforming Mr. Biden’s 2020 vote totals than about Mr. Trump achieving sharp gains, especially in Latino neighborhoods and lower-income areas. Ms. Harris’s vote total was down 12 percent overall from Mr. Biden’s in 2020, and 28 percent in low-income neighborhoods where Latino voters are the largest group.

In this rapidly growing area, red shifts were most evident in Latino neighborhoods. While Ms. Harris matched Mr. Biden’s vote total overall, Mr. Trump made significant gains throughout the area.

Mr. Trump was already popular with the county’s large Cuban American population, but in this election, his support surged with Latino voters from other groups as well. He received 20 percent more total votes in Latino neighborhoods where Cubans are not the predominant Latino group, like those with large populations of Nicaraguans or Colombians. This helped him flip Miami-Dade County for the first time since 1988, further cementing Florida as a decisively red state.

Mr. Trump saw gains on the city’s South Side, where there are Latino precincts with large Mexican populations, and his increased support coincided with Ms. Harris’s losses there. Ms. Harris picked up votes in some white neighborhoods, but those gains were erased by the losses elsewhere, allowing Mr. Trump to cut into the Democratic margin and flip the state back to the Republican column.

Latino neighborhoods accounted for nearly half of Mr. Trump’s total gains in his home city compared with 2020. While Ms. Harris won these precincts by a 40-point margin, that fell short of Mr. Biden’s 66-point margin in 2020. In a city with a diverse population of Latinos, Mr. Trump’s vote share grew among all of them — Puerto Rican neighborhoods, Dominican neighborhoods and Mexican neighborhoods alike.

Ms. Harris outperformed Mr. Biden in some parts of the city — especially in white precincts near the downtown area. White voters were the largest racial or ethnic group in 24 of the 25 precincts where she gained the most votes. But Ms. Harris lost some support in Latino and Black neighborhoods elsewhere in the city, and the Democratic margin fell to 59 points, from 64 points in 2020.

More than half of the Democratic vote decline occurred in Latino neighborhoods, even though these precincts accounted for just 16 percent of the overall vote total. Ms. Harris still won Latino neighborhoods by 23 points, but it was a 12-point drop from the 2020 margin of Mr. Biden, who narrowly won Arizona, a Republican stronghold won only twice by Democrats since 1952.

Even this city — known for its liberalism and its importance to Ms. Harris’s career — swung toward Mr. Trump. Ms. Harris’s losses were especially noticeable in the city’s Asian neighborhoods, which are predominantly Chinese but include thousands of voters from other groups. Though Ms. Harris still won the city by a 68-point margin, Mr. Trump gained more than 6,000 votes on top of her vote losses.

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France’s borrowing costs have risen above those of Greece for the first time, as investors fret that Michel Barnier’s government could fail to pass a belt-tightening budget.

The 10-year yield on French government debt briefly reached 3.02 per cent in early trading on Thursday, crossing above the 3.01 per cent yield demanded by lenders to Greece, before switching back.

The crossover reflects an upheaval in the perceived riskiness of Eurozone borrowers and underscores investors’ concern about France’s political and fiscal outlook at a time when Barnier’s minority administration is struggling to push through €60bn of tax increases and spending cuts.

“Looks like French politics are about to collide with the bond market,” said Andrew Pease, chief investment strategist at Russell Investments, as he suggested that market turmoil would eventually force politicians to accept fiscal discipline. “I think we know who wins.”

Under intense pressure from opposition parties, Barnier could face a crunch no-confidence vote as early as next week. On Thursday he made a major concession to Marine Le Pen’s far-right party by abandoning a plan to raise electricity taxes, in a bid to convince it not to bring down his months-old government.

“We can still be responsible and work together to improve the budget . . . or there is another road of uncertainty and . . . leaping into the budgetary and financial unknown,” said finance minister Antoine Armand, who also sought to dismiss any comparison between the French and Greek economies.

“France is not Greece,” he added on BFMTV. “France has . . . far superior economic and demographic power which means it is not Greece.”

French borrowing costs remain well below levels that would signify a bond market crisis, and 10-year bond yields fell back to 2.95 per cent later on Thursday, compared with Greece’s 2.99 per cent. France’s spread above German yields — a key measure of the riskiness of French bonds — has dropped back to 0.82 percentage points from a 12-year high of 0.9 points earlier in the week.

But Thursday’s moves underscore how investors are reclassifying Paris as one of the Eurozone’s riskier borrowers.

France’s government bond market endured its worst bout of selling in two years during the five trading days to Tuesday, according to flow data from BNY Investments. Geoff Yu, senior markets strategist at BNY, said it was the “most concentrated round of selling . . . since the height of the European energy crisis in late 2022”.

Greek bond yields have also fallen markedly as the country’s economy has recovered since its bailout during the 2012 crisis. Last year, Athens’ credit rating was lifted to investment grade for the first time.

Hedge funds have also built up bigger bets against French debt than during the nadir of the 2008 global financial crisis, according to data from S&P Global Market Intelligence.

Bonds out on loan — a measure of hedge fund short selling, or betting on a falling price — are now €99.7bn, compared with just under €85bn in September 2008.

Since the government lacks a majority in the assembly, it will probably have to use a constitutional mechanism to override lawmakers, which in turn would allow the opposition to call a no-confidence vote.

The French budget’s fate and that of Barnier’s administration remain largely in the hands of the far-right RN party, which is the biggest single party and a key voting bloc in the National Assembly.

Despite Barnier’s concession on electricity, the RN kept up pressure on the government and threatened to vote to bring it down if its demands were not met.

“There are still difficulties. It’s Thursday. He has until Monday,” Le Pen warned in Le Monde newspaper on Thursday night.

RN party leader Jordan Bardella hailed the government’s climbdown on the electricity tax as a “victory”.

“Other red lines still remain,” Bardella added in a post on X, reiterating the party’s calls for protecting the purchasing power of the public, particularly retirees and a “serious crackdown” on migration and crime. 

Concessions the government has made to the proposed budget in recent weeks may render impossible its goal to bring back the deficit to 5 per cent of national output by the end of 2025.

France overshot its deficit target for this year and will finish at above 6 per cent of GDP — far above the EU limit of 3 per cent of GDP.

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Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum on Thursday ruled out a trade war with the United States after speaking with President-elect Donald Trump, who has threatened stiff tariffs to halt illegal immigration.

“There will not be a potential tariff war,” Sheinbaum, who has been scrambling to head off threatened tariffs of 25 percent on Mexican goods, told a daily news conference.

She was speaking a day after a telephone call with Trump, who has threatened to slap tariffs on Canada and China in addition to Mexico over illegal immigration and drug trafficking.

After their call, Sheinbaum and Trump offered differing accounts of what they had discussed regarding migration.

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Trump claimed that Mexico’s left-wing president had “agreed to stop migration through Mexico, and into the United States, effectively closing our Southern Border.”

Sheinbaum later said she had discussed a policy already in place, and denied Trump’s version again Thursday.

“I can assure you… that we would never — we would not be capable — of proposing that we were going to close the border,” she said, adding: “Of course we do not agree with that.”

She said she had assured the Republican leader that a caravan of migrants assembled in southern Mexico, over which Trump had expressed concern, “will not reach the northern border,” pointing to Mexico’s “strategy” of preventing such convoys crossing its territory.

She said that after that, the talks had no longer revolved around the threat of tariff hikes.

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Writing Wednesday on X, Sheinbaum said she and Trump had also discussed “strengthening collaboration on security issues” as well as “the campaign we are conducting in the country to prevent the consumption of fentanyl.”

Trump caused panic among some of the biggest US trading partners on Monday when he said he would impose tariffs of 25 percent on Mexican and Canadian imports and 10 percent on goods from China.

He accused them of not doing enough to halt the “invasion” of the US by drugs “in particular fentanyl” and undocumented migrants.

Mexican Economy Minister Marcelo Ebrard warned Wednesday that some 400,000 jobs in the United States could be lost if Trump followed through on his threat.

He cited a study based on figures from US carmakers that manufacture in Mexico.

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Sheinbaum said Thursday that further conversations were planned between her government and Trump’s transition team before his January 20 inauguration.

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